Got my hands on an Xbox Series S. Here are some thoughts

CriticalGaming

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So imagine my surprise the other day when I walked randomly into my local mall's Gamestop and found that they just had a big stack of Xbox Series S's sitting on the counter. I thought they were for online orders, but nope, they just had a shitload of them like a bragging scalper. Except they can't scalp and I was able to get ahold of the next-gen Xbox for retail price. Sure it isn't the Series X which is the more powerful monster, but since i usually don't give a shit about Xbox in the first place i figured the digital slightly weaker console would be just fine for me.

Now I'd like to start off by saying that this thing is TINY. I'm genuinely impressed it is mostly next gen power compacted into a device that's about the size of three Switches taped together. Also I'm happy with how easily it synced with my Xbox Elite controller that I've been using on my PC for a couple years.

However, the set up for this thing is fucking dumb. Firstly it gives you a code and makes you download an Xbox Phone app. Once the app is synced to your console, the entire system set up is done on your phone through this app. Why? I have a controller, why doesn't the console just let me set it up on itself? The app does admittedly have it's uses though, you can download games, and manage stuff on your system including kicked off a family memeber should they be using it without permission.

The PS5 does allow me to remotely buy and download games via the Playstation Store website, which is also very easily used on most smart phones. However the Xbox App is a smoother and better way to do this remoting. Both uses are very niche, I tend to buy games while at work and it's nice that the website also let's me have the Playstation 5 download the game while I'm working so it's ready to play by the time I get home, and the Xbox app will let me do the same thing should i ever want too. And since the Series S is digital only (i tend to buy physical games whenever possible for PS5) I'll likely have more uses for the app long term because I can't get discs.

Anyway I immediately signed up for Gamepass because that's the crown jewel for Xbox right now and the first month was only a dollar, so that's keen. I then browsed through the entire list of games available on the service and I noticed something I had figured would be the case for a while. There are a LOT of games that, when I saw them on the service available, I wanted to play. But then I realized that almost every game that caught my interest in playing was old games that I either never played or just thought it would be cool to replay. So I went through the game list again and looked specifically for new games. Dear God Xbox has a lot of shooters. B-Cell must love this service, i don't see how he couldn't it has EVERY Doom game on it.

Since I'm not a shooter fan, I'm not interested in Halo and there struck me only two "new" games on Gamepass that caught my eye. The first was Forza Horizon 5 which is okay, it's more Forza but i feel like the Horizon games have such little structure that it is hard to get motivated to play for very long. It's not a game you play to "beat", it's the game you pick up to do a little racing then go about your day. It's beautiful looking and plays well, but the lack of purpose really demotivates me to play it for long. The other game was a game that probably isn't all that new and that was "Boyfriend Dungeon", which I heard about a bit ago. And it's a dungeon crawly-indie game that seems pretty good so far, though I did find that upon first launching the game there are like 4 different trigger warnings which itself was triggering to me, but whatever. It's fun and let's me be gay as FUCK! which is nice, damn these dudes are hot except for Evan who is a prick and is not date-worthy. Fuck Evan.

So the Gamepass thing is definitely more of a revisit-360-games thing for me thus far. I do kinds wanna play through the Gears of War series and I can do that here so you know it's fine. I really wish Xbox would get there act together and put out some meaningful and different games, but I doubt that we'll see Xbox put out anything like Uncharted or Horizon-like games anytime soon. But between the app and Xbox on PC, whenever i get an achievement it pops up on EVERYTHING I own now, which is irritating and i want to turn it off. I also don't like that there isn't a "rest mode" for the system, you can only turn it off outright and I really don't like that because booting it back up, while not slow, it feels slow compared to how fast the PS5 wakes up from rest mode.

Another thing was the controller. I played around with the new controller and I really felt myself missing the haptic feedback from the PS5 controller. Especially when playing Forza, I kept expecting to feel the triggers fight back on me while trying to break realy hard or jumps and bumps on the road like the PS5 controller did while playing Dirt 5. It's not a super big deal, but it is something that was very noticablly missed when playing on Xbox. Its little things like that leave me scratching my head, because I KNOW Xbox could be so much better, but a lot of this feels like Microsoft is treating Xbox like an afterthought even if that's probably not true.
 

hanselthecaretaker

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So imagine my surprise the other day when I walked randomly into my local mall's Gamestop and found that they just had a big stack of Xbox Series S's sitting on the counter. I thought they were for online orders, but nope, they just had a shitload of them like a bragging scalper. Except they can't scalp and I was able to get ahold of the next-gen Xbox for retail price. Sure it isn't the Series X which is the more powerful monster, but since i usually don't give a shit about Xbox in the first place i figured the digital slightly weaker console would be just fine for me.

Now I'd like to start off by saying that this thing is TINY. I'm genuinely impressed it is mostly next gen power compacted into a device that's about the size of three Switches taped together. Also I'm happy with how easily it synced with my Xbox Elite controller that I've been using on my PC for a couple years.

However, the set up for this thing is fucking dumb. Firstly it gives you a code and makes you download an Xbox Phone app. Once the app is synced to your console, the entire system set up is done on your phone through this app. Why? I have a controller, why doesn't the console just let me set it up on itself? The app does admittedly have it's uses though, you can download games, and manage stuff on your system including kicked off a family memeber should they be using it without permission.

The PS5 does allow me to remotely buy and download games via the Playstation Store website, which is also very easily used on most smart phones. However the Xbox App is a smoother and better way to do this remoting. Both uses are very niche, I tend to buy games while at work and it's nice that the website also let's me have the Playstation 5 download the game while I'm working so it's ready to play by the time I get home, and the Xbox app will let me do the same thing should i ever want too. And since the Series S is digital only (i tend to buy physical games whenever possible for PS5) I'll likely have more uses for the app long term because I can't get discs.

Anyway I immediately signed up for Gamepass because that's the crown jewel for Xbox right now and the first month was only a dollar, so that's keen. I then browsed through the entire list of games available on the service and I noticed something I had figured would be the case for a while. There are a LOT of games that, when I saw them on the service available, I wanted to play. But then I realized that almost every game that caught my interest in playing was old games that I either never played or just thought it would be cool to replay. So I went through the game list again and looked specifically for new games. Dear God Xbox has a lot of shooters. B-Cell must love this service, i don't see how he couldn't it has EVERY Doom game on it.

Since I'm not a shooter fan, I'm not interested in Halo and there struck me only two "new" games on Gamepass that caught my eye. The first was Forza Horizon 5 which is okay, it's more Forza but i feel like the Horizon games have such little structure that it is hard to get motivated to play for very long. It's not a game you play to "beat", it's the game you pick up to do a little racing then go about your day. It's beautiful looking and plays well, but the lack of purpose really demotivates me to play it for long. The other game was a game that probably isn't all that new and that was "Boyfriend Dungeon", which I heard about a bit ago. And it's a dungeon crawly-indie game that seems pretty good so far, though I did find that upon first launching the game there are like 4 different trigger warnings which itself was triggering to me, but whatever. It's fun and let's me be gay as FUCK! which is nice, damn these dudes are hot except for Evan who is a prick and is not date-worthy. Fuck Evan.

So the Gamepass thing is definitely more of a revisit-360-games thing for me thus far. I do kinds wanna play through the Gears of War series and I can do that here so you know it's fine. I really wish Xbox would get there act together and put out some meaningful and different games, but I doubt that we'll see Xbox put out anything like Uncharted or Horizon-like games anytime soon. But between the app and Xbox on PC, whenever i get an achievement it pops up on EVERYTHING I own now, which is irritating and i want to turn it off. I also don't like that there isn't a "rest mode" for the system, you can only turn it off outright and I really don't like that because booting it back up, while not slow, it feels slow compared to how fast the PS5 wakes up from rest mode.

Another thing was the controller. I played around with the new controller and I really felt myself missing the haptic feedback from the PS5 controller. Especially when playing Forza, I kept expecting to feel the triggers fight back on me while trying to break realy hard or jumps and bumps on the road like the PS5 controller did while playing Dirt 5. It's not a super big deal, but it is something that was very noticablly missed when playing on Xbox. Its little things like that leave me scratching my head, because I KNOW Xbox could be so much better, but a lot of this feels like Microsoft is treating Xbox like an afterthought even if that's probably not true.
Their forte isn’t in hardware engineering, even though it’s apparently the best made Xbox yet. I last had a X360 which was free with a laptop purchase from Best Buy over ten years ago now. It was the little things that irritated me, like everything being proprietary which is the complete opposite of PC+Windows. I couldn’t even use a USB to backup saves, play videos or load pictures on without reformatting it to be “Xbox” ready. Then the networking shit, while it might’ve worked more smoothly especially next to the PS3 back then, just made me feel like the bloody idiot they assumed I must’ve been with how patronizing everything felt regarding the design choices.

It just made me think why am I doing this when I have a much better PC option upstairs, but I can see how or why people who only use Mac would like it more as an entertainment device.
 

CriticalGaming

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Their forte isn’t in hardware engineering, even though it’s apparently the best made Xbox yet. I last had a X360 which was free with a laptop purchase from Best Buy over ten years ago now. It was the little things that irritated me, like everything being proprietary which is the complete opposite of PC+Windows. I couldn’t even use a USB to play videos or load picture on without reformatting it to be “Xbox” ready. Then the networking shit, while it might’ve worked more smoothly especially next to the PC, just made me feel like the bloody idiot they assumed I must’ve been with how patronizing everything felt regarding the design choices.

It just made me think why am I doing this when I have a much better PC option upstairs, but I can see how or why people who only use Mac would like it more as an entertainment device.
TBF I haven't heard anything about consoles crashing or "red ringing" so that's been a plus. The smoking stuff from the Series X has been proven to be fake so that doesn't count. The 360 and the One had problems that haven't happened to these next gen systems. So in terms of build quality, yeah i can see how it's the best Xbox yet, at least in terms of hardware.

But great hardware is nothing without shit to play on it. Netflix is a waste if you have nothing you want to watch right? So it's the same thing here imo. Yes there are a lot of great games on Gamepass and if you haven't had an Xbox ever, or in a long time, you likely have a lot of older games you now have a chance to try. So I can see the value here, yet for people like us who've been gaming for a while, there probably isn't a lot to offer and certainly the extremely slow trickle of games is a really bad look for Xbox overall.
 
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So I can see the value here, yet for people like us who've been gaming for a while, there probably isn't a lot to offer and certainly the extremely slow trickle of games is a really bad look for Xbox overall.
The only good thing about a XONE-S/X and X-SERIES is the frame rate boost and visual upres for old OG XBOX and 360 games. If I ever decide to get a SERIES, it'll be way later with a price drop.

However, the set up for this thing is fucking dumb. Firstly it gives you a code and makes you download an Xbox Phone app. Once the app is synced to your console, the entire system set up is done on your phone through this app. Why? I have a controller, why doesn't the console just let me set it up on itself? The app does admittedly have it's uses though, you can download games, and manage stuff on your system including kicked off a family memeber should they be using it without permission.
That sounds stupid and annoying. Not everyone is a kid, teen, or young adult that constantly lives on their phone Microsoft.

Dear God Xbox has a lot of shooters. B-Cell must love this service, i don't see how he couldn't it has EVERY Doom game on it.
Glad he is somewhere else far away to enjoy it and not be a constant annoyance.

Congrats on your console find otherwise.